There was a time when the roles of corporate professional advisers were sharply defined. Accountants did the sums, audited accounts and gave financial advice while lawyers dealt, largely reactively, with a well-compartmentalised class of problems which involved meeting legal obligations, securing proprietary rights and bringing or defending litigation claims; IP specialists and a range of others with specific skills or qualifications were hired as needed.

That compartmentalisation broke down when the larger accounting firms extended their roles, either by taking work away from lawyers or by offering services which met clients’ needs (whether they knew of those needs or not) and furthered their objectives. I refer in this context, as I have done before, to an article written in 2011 by Tom Kilroy, now Chief Administrative Officer and Chief of Staff at Misys, called Big 4 a reason. The article describes how the big consulting firms moved on from…